


Places to Live in Between

by ivyspinners



Category: The Sandman
Genre: Disturbing Themes, Gen, Multifandom Women Comment Ficathon, Non-Graphic Violence, Post-Series
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-01-30
Updated: 2013-01-30
Packaged: 2017-11-27 14:32:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,563
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/663084
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ivyspinners/pseuds/ivyspinners
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Thessaly" and "survival" are so close in meaning, they might as well be synonyms. Set post-series.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Places to Live in Between

**Author's Note:**

> Written for [streussal](http://streussal.livejournal.com/)'s [prompt](http://fluffyfrolicker.livejournal.com/35323.html?thread=965627#t965627) at the [Multifandom Women Comment Ficathon](http://fluffyfrolicker.livejournal.com/35323.html): _survival is a way of life_.

She's travelled half way around the world, further, through caverns of monsters like your worst nightmares stitched together, though worlds of ten senses with only two her own, though timeless realms of endless knowledge, and now that she's back on solid ground again, Thessaly isn't sure what she wants to do next.

"Hilarious," she says drily, looking at the sky above and the mother moon to whom she plays errant daughter, sometimes, and ambitious challenger every hour in between.

Her shoes clack on the narrow sidewalk. Must have lost some of their magic on the winding way home.

She passes a witch shop -- none of that new age nonsense, she can almost smell the blood spilled in the back rooms -- but doesn't enter. Experience has taught her well. She can retouch the spells tomorrow. First, a place to sleep. A place to think.

\- : -

It's shabby and damp.

It will do.

There's a window facing the gray, crumbling backs of another residential building -- a _killer_ view, that -- and Thessaly falls asleep by its side, arms resting on the sill and head cushioned on them. Her travelling bag is so small on the outside, the tiny closet still looks empty.

\- : -

"What do you do for a living?"

"I study," Thessaly says.

The girl behind the counter is not, cannot possibly be, the person who splashed the concrete in the back rooms with so much life they hum with power. But she's all there is.

"Sounds boring," the girl mutters, turning the page of her new-age magazine. Her nails are painted in alternating red and yellow. Thessaly snorts silently, and doesn't point out that she's been on one page for the past fifteen minutes.

"I've had worse," she shrugs. "Do you mind if I see your back rooms?" The girl frowns, opening her mouth, and Thessaly tells her in her _best_ pert tone, "I really must insist." She throws a twist of power in her words, just the faintest hint of compulsion, and the girl stops, narrowing her eyes. "Trust me, we'll all be better for it."

She leaves with the spell on her shoes touched up again, dragging the spirits of five wild, wounded hyenas with her.

As she dumps them beside the front door (they materialise, almost immediately, into a rug that she makes sure to skirt around), Thessaly remembers the shopkeeper's lips pressed together in a thin line, which hadn't entirely hidden her curiosity. And smiles.

\- : -

She buys a small orange bush and lets it grow by her window, watering the pot twice a day. A spider tries to spin its web in one dark corner. No other insects try, after Thessaly deals with it.

She keeps her travel bag in her closet.

Paints the walls with runes invisible to the naked eye.

\- : -

This city is no different than any other she's visited.

Thessaly walks through the museums and corrects the displays in her head, when it amuses her. There had always been women among the spears, women whose bodies were painted in bold blue patterns and stinking of animal fat. Power from blood on the ground. There still are women like that.

Is still a woman like that.

The shopkeeper finds her during her second week. Introduces herself as Alex.

\- : -

She's found so many new books, Thessaly buys a book shelf.

Alex visits, mutters, "I _know_ I've read this before, and I don't even like reading." Pauses. "I think. But not all of it." And leaves behind a sense of _presence_.

Thessaly soaks under moonlight that night. She'll give the book to Alex; she has most of it memorised.

\- : -

"You're always busy," Alex complains, and this is a rare enough occurrence that Thessaly shows her surprise.

"I'm careful," says Thessaly. She pauses. "But I'll join your coven tonight, if you want."

\- : -

Before she knows it, she's lived four years in one place, has found a circle of friends who knows she's older than she looks, though not quite how much.

Her closet isn't big enough to hold everything any longer, so she navigates her living room and bundles up her antiques, stuffing them into her favourite, bigger-on-the-inside trunk.

Alex finds a boyfriend, then a girlfriend, then another girlfriend who she swears is _the one_ , wraps that belief around her like a cloak Thessaly's not sure is good for her. But she attends the engagement dinner ("We'll wait as long as we have to, to get married," Alex says) and watching them laugh, reconsiders.

Thessaly is walking home from that engagement dinner when her _senses_ shift somehow.

She stops.

Stares at the ground in front of her.

Scuffs her foot over the snow-covered sidewalk, and exposes the patterned red beneath to the light of a full moon.

"Careless," Thessaly says into the empty air -- it's as quiet as the city ever gets -- not bothering to move. "I'm almost insulted, really."

He moves.

She moves.

She sends everything she has, the blood from her fingers and the power from the earth.

He twists, turns. As fast as an animal, free at last in the wild. Avoids.

Hyena teeth gleaming in the moonlight. There is _power_ there. Far more than what a mere spirit could hope to gather.

He might actually have come close, if he hadn't picked the full moon. _Careless_ , she thinks this again as she blazes with its silvery power, blasts him far away. Then seals the exit behind him just in case.

Thinks, without surprise, _he was the first_. Hyenas run in packs.

\- : -

This is not the first time. It is not, even, the thousandth time. Thessaly remembers:

The first city she entered was one she and her sisters had helped build. They hadn't given blood to its bones, but they'd poured their sweat and time into its construction and that was almost as good. She had walked the earth so long, she'd seen the animals of her wetlands dwindle in number and vanish -- and that new city they were building was of marble, which wasn't really eternal when you lived as long as she did, but came close.

She remembers the earthquake, the flood, the armies that followed. They'd decided to stay, to protect their home, their monument -- their legacy. They stood against the pale, beautiful woman walking the streets in all her elegance, all her understated sadness and outward cheer, the woman who'd left and then returned as a shadow on its horizon -- _This city has its own Death too_ , she had realised, and she told her sisters that she was leaving that afternoon to collect herbs by the nearby river.

\- : -

Alex wakes up with a gasp, her visions still ringing in her ears and making her ache. " _Thessaly_ ," she whispers in alarm, grabs her clothes.

Twenty minutes later, she's pounding her fists on Thessaly's door.

\- : -

She dreams of Morpheus, and isn't sure if it's her own imagining, or if the new Dream is trying to torment her.

Though he's probably too busy to.

He shakes his head, almost disappointed. "Always leaving."

"Like I left you?" Thessaly asks, sharp. "You _know_ that was for a different reason."

"I could have given you a _life_ ," he says, and Thessaly knows then that this isn't even a _shadow_ of who Morpheus was. His eyes are like holes, not bright like stars.

"I am my own legacy," she says, all she needs to say, all that is the _truth_ , "my own memorial. You died. I didn't."

Thessaly jerks awake. Someone is pounding on her door.

\- : -

Her knuckles are aching when it finally flies open, and she anticipates a cutting, _Appearances aside, I do **not** keep to a nocturnal cycle_ , and opens her mouth--

"Oh, are you looking for someone?" It is the landlady. "This room will be free in half an hour, once I get everything packed up."

Over the landlady's shoulder, Alex can see Thessaly's belongings in their neat piles, untouched. As if she'd simply vanished on her way home, except the landlady's holding a note, and Alex can see what's written on it: _I'm leaving all this to you. Take care. See you soon. Thessaly._

\- : -

"I'm so sorry," a flustered woman apologises. The toddler in her arms grabs fistfuls of her blouse, but she doesn't notice. "He just got away from me--" she gestures at another door yawning open, down the hallway.

"Oh, it's fine," Thessaly assures her. "I was going to wake up anyway." She offers a smile.

The light from the hallway vanishes as she closes the door. Thessaly is struck, suddenly, by Alex's voice, imagines her friend exclaiming in her over-the-top way, "How could you just leave behind _four years_? Doesn't your life _mean_ anything?"

She didn't, Thessaly doesn't quite say aloud. Those were just things. And she _will_ see _Alex_ again, soon.

"This _is_ my life." Her voice is loud in the empty room, surprising her. She's silent on her way to the window, and stays that way, watching the sky change colour.

(Once, she had watched from a secluded mountaintop as the sun rose over the green and blue flames devouring her city. The chilly air hummed with her sisters' magic, power spent battling the armies at their gates. The herbs from the riverside were still bunched in her fists, crushed with the pressure of her grip until their juices ran down her fingers.)

The sun's about to rise.

And she's poised to watch.

\- : -

**Well**?


End file.
